Notable Books: Fiction

Published: December 2, 2001

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THE FOURTH HAND . By John Irving. (Random House, $26.95.) The protagonist of this novel loses one hand to a circus lion, but on balance the encounter seems profitable, leading toward occupational sobriety and the love of a good woman who imposes her moral priorities on him.

FURY . By Salman Rushdie. (Random House, $24.95.) In the first of Rushdie's novels to be set squarely in New York, a dapper Cambridge professor from India who is also a successful deviser of television puppets participates in replays of the creator-creature question and denounces a good many things that he sees in America.

GABRIEL'S STORY . By David Anthony Durham. (Doubleday, $23.95.) Fifteen years old and black in the post-Civil-War West, the hero of this keen first novel is as outside as an outsider can be; he has every qualification for the self-sufficiency that enables the classic confrontations of cowboy, Indian and nester.

THE GARDENS OF KYOTO . By Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $24.) An elusive, eloquent first novel whose plot moves back and forth in America, Paris and Japan, as its narrator, a woman coming of age in the 1950's, construes the past in a way that obscures some uncomfortable facts but never involves her in emotional dishonesty.

GETTING A LIFE: Stories . By Helen Simpson. (Knopf, $22.) Unsentimental, stylistically playful, acutely observed British stories featuring two victim classes: women who sacrifice their lives for their children, and career women who rarely see the kids except on weekends.

THE GLASS PALACE . By Amitav Ghosh. (Random House, $25.95.) A morally and psychologically complicated novel that examines the frequent deceptions and self-deceptions of India's Anglicized elite, a tribe deliberately created by Britain to think and act Britishly, still going strong after 50 years of independence.

GLUE . By Irvine Welsh. (Norton, paper, $14.95.) Imbued with the quality of oral epic by the argot of the Edinburgh pubs and projects, this novel follows the growth to middle-aged dissolution of four boyhood friends whose only limitless prospect is for self-destruction.

GOATS . By Mark Jude Poirier. (Talk Miramax/Hyperion, $22.) When the hero of this first novel, a 14-year-old straight-A stoner from Tucson, goes east to a fancy prep school, he leaves behind not only his infantile New Age mother but also his surrogate father, a handyman who tends the flatulent bovid ruminants of the title.

THE GOOD GERMAN . By Joseph Kanon. (Holt, $26.) The deepest considerations of right and wrong pervade this novel about an American journalist searching for his prewar lover in the ruined (and harrowingly described) Berlin of 1945, where everything is for sale and experience with rocket weapons commands a very high price.

THE GRAND COMPLICATION . By Allen Kurzweil. (Theia/Hyperion, $24.95.) A librarian whose life strategy depends on rules and compulsions acquires and then escapes a peculiar benefactor and his obsessions in this engaging, multilevel novel.

HAUSSMANN, OR THE DISTINCTION . By Paul LaFarge. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A novel that invents fanciful variations (including a peculiar love affair with a foundling) on themes from the life of the great city planner Georges Eugène Haussmann, who tore up a still medieval Paris, beginning in 1853, and transformed it into the light-filled city it is now.

HONEYMOON: And Other Stories . By Kevin Canty. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.) Elliptical, impressionistic short stories, in a style at once tender and telegraphic, featuring characters who do the wrong things for the wrong reasons; for starters, in the first story Godzilla declares his love for Tokyo.

HONEYMOONERS: A Cautionary Tale . By Chuck Kinder. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A production by a close friend of Raymond Carver that projects Carver's alcoholism and profligacy, and even some of his well-known short stories, onto a character called Ralph Crawford in a sort of eulogy à clef for a great American writer.

HOTEL HONOLULU . By Paul Theroux. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) "Fawlty Towers" goes darkly Hawaiian in this comic novel, in which the author uses the grotesque denizens of the title hostelry to explore the exoticism of ordinariness -- or is it the other way around?

THE HOTHOUSE . By Wolfgang Koeppen. Translated by Michael Hofmann. (Norton, $23.95.) A masterpiece of German literature, first published in 1953 and now in English, about an honest politician attempting to rebuild postwar Germany.

HOW TO BE GOOD . By Nick Hornby. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A surprisingly sentimental novel in which a British physician's snarling husband falls under the influence of a faith healer and embarks on the venture of transformation to goodness, perhaps excessive goodness.

THE HUNTER . By Julia Leigh. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $20.) A moody first novel that follows an obsessed Australian hunter in his effort, undertaken on a mission for a biotech company, to find and kill a Tasmanian tiger, a beast as fierce as the hunter himself but believed extinct since 1936.